The history of the Salem Press
Editor’s Note: If you’d like two tickets to the Wilton Mall cinema to review the new “Superman” movie for our “Sunday Paper Edition” let me know. Maybe you can become the next Siskel, or even Ebert…
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Ground Breaking Friday for New Credit Union Between Hannaford and CVS
Hudson River Community Credit Union plans to break ground on its newest branch in Greenwich today, Friday, July 11.
The ceremony is scheduled for 11 a.m. to noon at 1167 State Route 29, between Hannaford and CVS. The event will feature remarks from HRCCU CEO Sue Commanda, local officials, and community leaders.
The new branch is intended to expand access to financial products and services for residents of Washington County and surrounding communities. Credit union representatives said the project reflects HRCCU’s continued investment in providing high-quality financial services across the Capital Region.
Attendees at the ceremony will have the opportunity to view renderings of the planned facility and witness the official groundbreaking, complete with hard hats and ceremonial shovels.
HRCCU board members, staff, and members of the community are expected to attend.
The History of the Salem Press
By Jan Baxter
Editor, The Salem Press
How do you go about finding out the history of something that interests you in Salem? Maybe you’re searching for something from the 1970s or, even further back, maybe information about the village of Salem from the 1890s? You could ask around town, maybe inquire to the Librarian at Bancroft Public Library but, quite honestly, you probably are not going to find many people with answers to your historical questions.
This is where journalism in Salem and the history of The Salem Press are invaluable resources; the newspaper records history and allows readers (and then researchers) to find glimpses into the vibrant town Salem, New York once was and, in various ways, continues to be in 2025.
Let’s consider the the first two of the 5 W’s of Journalism: starting with When the paper started and What has made it important in the lives of Salem residents for 180 years.
According to The Salem Book, written by a descendant of General John Williams and published in 1896, the first iteration of The Salem Press – while not even bearing the same name – “was issued to the public on June 18th, 1794. It was a three-column folio, sixteen inches in length.” THE TIMES; OR NATIONAL COURIER. SALEM (State of New York). Printed by George Gerrish — three doors south of Court House. Wednesday, 18th June, 1794. “May we never seek applause from party principles, but always deserve it from public spirit.” The National Courier’s motto sounds suspiciously political, doesn’t it? It was meant to be!
Before 1800, early newspapers were not as we know them now. They were typically short on “news” and long on Legal Notices and Real Estate transactions. Readers were accustomed to reading newspapers from New York City, with the printed news arriving as much as a few weeks late when in print and delivered to Salem by railroad delivery. The papers were – at most- eight pages in length.
Writings from the University of Illinois School of Journalism help us understand that the first half of the 19th century brought dramatic changes in transportation and communications to the US. The introduction of the railroad and the telegraph greatly accelerated the transmission and dissemination of information and news. These changes both increased the demand for newspapers and allowed smaller towns and villages like Salem, and no longer just large metropolitan cities, to have their own newspapers. In 1800 there were only 200 newspapers being published in the United States and by 1860 there were 3,000. Many of the newspapers founded in the early 1800s were politically driven. Indeed, the early publishing in Salem was political motivated and led by Republican leaders in Washington County.
The Salem Book writes, “The Times; or National Courier” was the first newspaper published in Washington county; its existence terminated in January 1795. A second effort was made to establish a newspaper in Salem by St. John Honeywood, as editor, and William W. Wands, as publisher. They commenced the publication of “The Washington Patrol” on May 27th, 1796; after a few weeks, however, “The Patrol” was discontinued. A third effort to establish a newspaper was made by Henry Dodd. Its title was the “Northern Sentinel”, first published on January 1st, 1798. Since that time, Salem has not been without a weekly newspaper published within its limits, except a few weeks in 1848.” (Reminder to current readers that The Salem Book was, itself, published in 1896 so this claim of Salem having never been without a newspaper was then only 48 years old.)
Advertising was rare in early newspapers but a printed Blacksmith advertisement by James Rowan, ferrier, from December 13th, 1819 in the Northern Sentinel made it known that “Those indebted to the subscriber are requested to call and settle, as soon as convenient. Grain, meat, and cash received in payment.”
But when did The Salem Press become “The Salem Press”? Again, from The Salem Book, “In June 1842, a new publication was established in Salem, under the title of the “Washingtonian”; issued semi-monthly by William B. Harkness and John W. Curtis. It was devoted to the support of the Washingtonian movement in the interest of temperance. This paper lived only a few months. Mr. Harkness made another effort to establish a newspaper in Salem: in this he was more successful, and on the 21st of May, 1850, issued a weekly newspaper, which he styled the “Salem Press”.
As of May, 2025, the Salem Press is officially 175 years young!
In the mid-1800s editors increasingly relied on the telegraph for gathering news, but even then only a small portion of a rural newspapers content came from the telegraphs and the editors continued to use newspaper exchanges or services that, eventually, became wire services that are known today at the Associated Press and Reuters.
Today, small town newspapers are valued for their local news but in the first part of the 18th century rural newspapers like the Salem Press covered primarily foreign and national news. In small communities, local news was more easily, and inexpensively, communicated by word of mouth. And, when a newspaper was run by a single person who was doing the publishing, the editing, and the printing, the operator had little time to do much original reporting. It was simply easier for them to copy stories from larger newspapers and news sources. Newspapers in the 1800s may not have individually lasted long for one reason or another but the newspaper business was thriving.
The Salem Press newspaper has since gone through many publishers and has had the format of the paper changed many, many times since the inception of The Salem Press. When my great-great aunt, Clara Toleman was Editor of the paper in the 1930s “Personals” with news of visitors from out of town, hospitalizations, marriage ceremonies, and local church programs, were prominently featured as they continued to be through the 1980s and 1990s. Facebook seems to have taken the place of the Personals column in our day and age and many lament that change. There is something nostalgic and, well, heart-warming, about being able to look back at ‘simpler times’ and recognize family names from the 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s in the Personals: Dr. Ston’s daughter visited him. Mary Behan entertained the Tulip family over the weekend, visiting from Massachusetts. Mrs. Rogers was a patient in Mary McClellan Hospital.
Perhaps the greatest change in our small-town newspaper’s origins is the publication of REAL local news. The editors over the years have captured our town’s history. The Salem Press ceased being an independent newspaper in 1969 when it merged with the Greenwich Journal and was published by the Tefft family as “The Greenwich Journal and Salem Press”.
After the papers merged, only a few weeks later, the business block in the middle of Salem’s Main Street was gutted by a devastating fire. The Greenwich Journal and Salem Press had the details and photos as front-page news. Photos of the fire vividly show the destruction and how it came within feet of also taking the Abrams building with it.
The Greenwich Journal and Salem Press reported In October of 1975 that the Proudfit Building was named to the National Register of Historic Places, a prestigious honor. The paper reported on the distinction in the Salem section of the newspaper.
Three months later, in January of 1976 the Proudfit Building, on a cold Sunday afternoon, was engulfed by flames and the newspaper reported on the fire, the heroics of townspeople saving items from the Library and the businesses, the number of mutual aid fire companies who responded, and captured the Salem’s despair in what to do next as shown in the Letter to the Editor (Dick Tefft) by Salem resident, Janice Spallholz. All this would be lost without the reporting of the newspaper and newspaper archives to search.
The Greenwich Journal and Salem Press joined together under one masthead in 1969 and ran as a weekly paper, under the guardianship of the Tefft family as publishers, through 2013 when a series of events caused the ownership to change. If you go back and look through the newspapers’ decades, though, it is hard to not notice that Salem news was not getting featured prominently to the point that it was looking more like an afterthought in the newsroom.
The newspaper industry has taken a hard hit in the last twenty years. In 2004 there were 9000 daily newspapers publishing in the US. In 2024, only 5000 are still being published, not all as daily newspapers. Locally we have seen the Washington County Post, the Troy Record, the daily Post Star, and many other newspapers go out of business all together or change their frequency of publication.
Considering the current state of rural newspapers, you may wonder, then, why did the Salem Press begin start back up in June of last year? The answer: Salem has a great deal going on that is newsworthy, important to the community, and needs to be documented and shared.
A year ago, a group of seven Salem friends from the Town of Salem, the Historic Salem Courthouse, and the Journal-Press got together at On A Limb bakery to talk about the sad state of Salem news in the Journal-Press. Darren Johnson, the publisher of the paper, listened to everyone’s comments and said he would be willing to try an independent Salem Press, independent of the Greenwich Journal if we could find an Editor.
I’d been a Salem correspondent in the 1970s and was Editor of the Journal-Press in the early 1980s. My great-great Aunt Clara Toleman, my Grandfather Earl Toleman, my material Aunt Dorothy Toleman Christensen, had all been Editors of the Salem Press. This small-town newspaper is in my genealogical ‘blood’. My hand shot up at our start-up meeting and I took on the role of Editor.
The first issue of the bi-weekly Salem Press was published in September of 2024. The Salem Press depends on local advertising and subscriptions to the newspaper to keep us in business and month by month we are seeing our readership go up as we offer Salem and surrounding communities news, sports, local features, and a calendar of upcoming events.
My hope is that we will be independent and publishing for many years to come so that Salem history is preserved in newspaper archives for historians decades from now to research and learn about our bustling rural community of Salem, New York.
And Now for the Comics — ‘Animal Crackers’ by Mike Osbun
This is one of Mike’s best strips. More tomorrow!